PREFACE

“Grinding a sword for ten years, but the blade is yet to be tried.” These two poetic lines by the Chinese poet Jia Dao (779–843) have come to signify working on something for a long time, hoping the time and labor produce good results. For me, writing this book took not ten years in preparation but much longer. But I did not mind grinding it out slowly, even if what came out was not always to my liking. As the pages of the book will explain, the grinding itself gave me much joy and meaning.

The idea of writing a book like this came to me at the end of my doctoral dissertation in the late 1990s. The original book title had in it the phrase “a heart and mind for wanting to learn” (hao-xue-xin, 好學心), as it was the research topic of my dissertation. The phrase is a native Chinese learning concept that my mother suggested to me. When I was exploring a dissertation topic, I asked my mother first, as I always did, to share my learning with her, to brainstorm learning concepts upon hearing the translated term achievement motivation (成就動機) from Western psychology. She was puzzled about the Western concept, could not produce a single association in Chinese, and sat there speechless quite some time. Finally, she muttered, “What does learning have to do with motivation?! I only know a motive to murder” (in Chinese, motivation and motive are translated as the same term 動機. Upon reflection on these two English terms, I, too, failed to discern really meaningful differences!). I knew that if my college-educated mother – who had, in effect, also received a secondhand doctoral education through me – could not make sense of achievement motivation, chances are that the people I was going to study in China would not either. I then asked her what Chinese concept captures people’s desire to learn. Without any hesitation, she said hao-xue-xin. “Yes, you are right! Why didn’t I think of it?” I exclaimed and felt that I had just hit the jackpot. When I consulted my Chinese peers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, they unanimously embraced this concept, to my delight. My peers and I racked our brains to come up with a good translation but failed. We decided to stick to the somewhat awkward English translation, for we felt that the translation is accurate in meaning and feeling and speaks to us: a heart and mind for wanting to learn. Subsequently, this native concept came to stand for the Chinese learning model in my research and writing.